In search of a body of work

Abstract

Short story collections, fragmentary assemblages, negotiate a particular kind of relationship to the corpus or ‘body of work’. They communicate an ambivalence about a process of embodiment and of growth. In their relationship to each other, as collected but non-continuous, they grow by means of a pulling apart, where each new piece ruptures, destroys, returns back to the beginning, that which has come before. This personal essay considers the writer’s own process of growing such a written body of work whilst in recovery from an eating disorder: whereby her own body’s reluctance to put on weight beyond the limits of the page is also played out in a struggle on the page. How to reconcile desire with its inevitable end, a body (of work)? The essay considers how, in its distaste the prospect of fullness and completion, the fragment may articulate a disordered relationship with nourishment but, when collected together, may offer a way to think about writing alternative bodies, non-conforming bodies, bodies which are always something less than whole. As such, writing becomes a tool in a recovery of a body of sorts. What is achieved in such fragmentary process may not be a healthy body, a reassuring body, but it is better than nothing and may better express the ambivalence and disturbance of body as process. Drawing small nourishment from Hélène Cixous, from Maurice Blanchot, the essay theorizes a kind of writing which has learnt to survive and, as a collection of fragments, does so as evidence or proof – of a ‘good enough’ body which, is of course, defined as much by the ways in which it falls short.